Papers of Cora Du Bois

Cora Alice Du Bois (1903-1991), anthropologist and educator, was Zemurray Stone-Radcliffe Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University from 1954 until her retirement in 1969. She was the first woman to receive tenure in Harvard’s Department of Anthropology, and the second woman to join the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Du Bois received a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1932, conducting research on Native Americans in the Western United States. In 1935, she was awarded a year-long fellowship to study the uses of psychiatry in anthropology by the National Academy of Sciences, spending six months at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital and six months at the New York Psychoanalytic Society. Du Bois taught at Hunter College from 1936 to 1937, before moving to the island of Alor to conduct research, where she remained until 1939.

During World War II, she served as an analyst for the Office of Strategic Services and was posted to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) with the Southeast Asia Command, where she was head of the OSS Research and Analysis branch. It was in Ceylon that she met her lifelong partner, fellow OSS employee Jeanne Taylor. For her war service, Du Bois received the Exceptional Civilian Service Award from the United States Army in 1946, and the Thai government honored her with the Order of the Crown of Thailand in 1949.

After the war, Du Bois worked for the State Department and the World Health Organization. In 1954, she accepted an appointment at Harvard University as the second person to be the Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone-Radcliffe Professor at Radcliffe College, where she taught undergraduate and graduate Harvard and Radcliffe students in the departments of Anthropology and Social Relations. She also served as an honorary curator at the Peabody Museum. From 1968 to 1969, Du Bois was president of the American Anthropological Association. After retiring from Harvard in 1969, she taught at Cornell University and the University of California, San Diego. Du Bois died in 1991.